In Pictures: Entec with Gorgon City

Lighting designer Andy Emmerson and Entec have collaborated on a recent Gorgon City tour.

Deep house act Gorgon City have enjoyed enormous success in recent years with their blend of electronic, bass-driven anthems, including ‘Ready For Your Love’ and ‘Real Life’.

Based around North London, production duo Kye ‘Foamo’ Gibbon and Matt ‘RackNRuin’ Robson-Scott, extended the live Gorgon City experience, which gained new fans when they hit the highway in January and February 2019 for a short tour of the UK and Ireland

After relying on a variety of rental sources for a recent American trek, the act turned to Entec to furnish their Escapetour which began at Newcastle’s O2 Academy, continuing in Manchester, Nottingham, Bristol, Dublin and peaking at the 3,000-capacity Printworks event space in south-east London on 8 February.

“We travelled with a fairly compact rig and I didn’t have the luxury of a tech, so that partially informed my kit choices,” said Emmerson, a long-time Entec associate.

“It was all down to me to load it in every day and re-program each house rig, which naturally differed from gig to gig.” Running one universe from an Avolites Tiger Touch and fader wing, Emmerson specified a floor package of six Clay Paky A.leda B-EYE K20s, six Solaris Flares and four Robe Pointes.

“Although the choices were minimal, what I had at my disposal was a versatile range of kit that offered a lot of creative scope when supplementing the house lighting. One can never really be sure that you’ll have what you need at the venues to fulfil your ideas, so it’s always best to come armed with fixtures that will give you some flexibility, and this was a good example of such a situation.

Much of Emmerson’s design focused on silhouette work and he credited the Pointes’ superior beam and gobo effects for delivering these and other key looks. He positioned a Solaris Flare behind each of the act’s three risers to further “accentuate the silhouettes, adding a lot of strobing and washes into the mix”, while an additional three Flares in front of the risers effected an extra dimension of moodiness to the singers’ presence. “I’ve been in love with the Flares since day one,” Emmerson commented.

“Building the strobe up on top of the wash is one of those great moments for me.”

The LD’s previous experience of the B-EYE led him to include the Clay Paky wash/beam hybrid in his spec. “Their brightness is phenomenal and the results have been great every time, so why not? I had two of them downstage to project across the vocalists and into the audience. The other four were in the gaps between the risers upstage, shooting strong beams out from the stage.

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